Monthly Archives: May 2017

Every year people arrive in the United States of America to start a new life here. Some of them are refugees, fleeing their country due to military conflicts, fear of persecution and other harsh circumstances. The maximum number of refugees allowed to enter the country is set by the President of the United States annually. In the past twenty years, this admission ceiling was between 90,000 and 70,000 people, while for the current year of 2017 it was raised to 110,000. The Bureau of Population, Refugees, and Migration tracks various information about admitted individuals; today, we will look at religion.

We all know that the home prices are slowly rising. The question is, what type of homes are driving the increase — cheap homes or expensive ones?

Let us split the home prices into four groups — from the top 25 percent to the bottom 25 percent by sale price. To better understand the dynamics of prices, we plot the ratio of the average price in the top three groups to the bottom one.

As we continue our study of the business patterns in different U.S. industries, we now focus on the accommodation and food services sector. The major share of all businesses in this industry is restaurants, both full-service and limited-service. The latter, according to the North American Industry Classification System, are restaurants in which patrons order at a counter and pay before eating. Most of these are fast food chains.

Cement is one of the key building materials in the world, both in the residential and nonresidential sector. This material is also used for the production of concrete. Thus, more than 70 percent of cement sales in the United States went to producers of ready-mixed concrete, and about 12 percent of sales went to concrete product manufacturers. According to information published at Statista.com, around 4,100 million metric tons of cement were produced globally in 2015. The U.S. accounted for about 83.4 million metric tons of this production. The year before, 4,180 million metric tons of material were produced worldwide, and 83.2 million metric tons were produced in the U.S. In 2013, these numbers were smaller: 4,080 million metric tons globally and about 77.4 million metric tons in the U.S.

The U.S. Census Bureau’s Survey of Construction provides us with, among many other aspects, data on house design: whether a house is attached or detached. Attached houses are 20 percent smaller — 2000 square feet on average, compared to 2500 square feet for detached houses. The difference is even more pronounced on a scatterplot; as one may have expected, there are virtually no attached houses among large and expensive ones.

How many bedrooms does the average home have? And how much would an extra bedroom cost you?

In order to answer these questions, we take another look at the U.S. Census Bureau’s Survey of Construction data. First of all, let’s make a map showing in which parts of the country houses have the highest average number of bedrooms:

According to the Food and Agriculture Organization, in 2005 the United States harvested 4,888,621 tons of fish from wild fisheries and another 471,958 tons from aquaculture. The U.S. is the fifth-leading producer of fish after China, Peru, India and Indonesia, producing 3.8 percent of the global total.

The U.S. Census Bureau’s Survey of Construction suggests that these two outdoor features are becoming increasingly popular, with each of them present in more than half of all homes sold since 2004. Conversely, the percentage of new homes sold with a deck or without any outdoor features are decreasing, with less than one in five homes sold in 2013 having a deck and less than one in ten with no outdoor features whatsoever.

According to the 2010 Census technical documentation, there are more than 6 million different surnames in the U.S. — quite the diversity! Of course, the number of popular surnames is much smaller. Two out of three names appear only once. And only 0.4 percent (or one in 250) appear at least a thousand times.